


The Altered Perspective of Lying Down

by DawnlitWaters



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Post-Movie: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-13
Updated: 2017-09-13
Packaged: 2018-12-27 17:50:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12086214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DawnlitWaters/pseuds/DawnlitWaters
Summary: That night, Gamora lies wakeful and fully clothed on top of the covers.





	The Altered Perspective of Lying Down

When it’s all over, and the dust has settled and the Ravager flares have faded, they go back to Berhert.

Rocket continues fixing the _Milano_ , ordering Kraglin around and clearly enjoying himself. Groot holds tools and only mostly gets in the way.

It happens one night, when the pressure has had time to build up again, and their collective grief and terror needs to find expression.

They lay on the grassy earth of the forest floor, between the _Milano_ and the _Quadrant_ , all seven of them. Someone has strewn blankets over the dusk-damp ground; someone else has turned off all the artificial lights on the two ships. They lie there in silence: Gamora thinks of her sister, out there among the stars.

Beside her, Peter shifts minutely and she feels his hand carefully wrap around hers. She meshes their fingers together, strokes her thumb slowly against his skin.

“It’s beautiful” says Mantis softly, from across the group.

Peter’s fingers squeeze Gamora’s tightly, and she bites her lip, fights the lump in her throat and smiles at the starscape overhead.

 

 ~

 

They take simple, easy contracts. Their wounds – emotional and physical – are still raw, and they all need the distraction of work without the real possibility of instant death.

 _This_ job is simpler than most. Hired to take care of a little local trouble, supporting the outpost’s resident Xandarian forces, they’re barely even needed. Gamora suspects that Rhomann Dey has only pushed this their way as a bit of light entertainment.

Or, as Rocket describes it, a piece of piss.

And it would have been, too. If not for the have-a-go hero, who starts calling the bandits names. He’s waving a gun – probably empty – at the nearly vanquished aggressors. Gamora privately thinks he’s being a complete idiot.

Right up until the point when he gets himself shot, and killed.

And then he becomes someone’s brother, someone’s father. Someone’s husband.

His wife, a beautiful Krylorian woman with moss-green eyes, falls down on her knees next to him, and never gets up again. She cries and cries, her pain ripping out of her under the indifferent blue sky. She screams and screams, hands clutching the front of his blood-soaked shirt. Relatives, friends and even her children try to pull her up, move her away from the body. But she refuses, buries her face in his still, bloodied chest, and howls as though her soul is being torn from her.

 

That night, Gamora lies wakeful and fully clothed on top of the covers.

Peter lies quietly beside her, one hand on his chest and the other holding hers in the small space between them. They are very quiet, looking up at the ceiling over the bed in his old room on the _Milano_.

They don’t do this, have never done this. And yet it feels natural, normal. They stay quiet, just breathing, listening to the light patter of rain on the hull.

They are silent for a very long time.

“You’re it for me. You know that, right?” Peter’s voice is thick and quiet, uncertain.

She squeezes his fingers.

“I know” she says, softly. The rain continues to patter gently on the hull of the ship overhead. It occurs to her that something else might be required of her. She squeezes his hand again, rewinds her fingers with his.

“Peter” she says, very quietly. He turns his head towards her, eyes dark and soft in the light from the dual-moons beyond the window. His eyes aren’t moss-green – never have been – and nor does he really resemble the fallen Xandarian man. But something had gripped her about the tragic tableaux: the bright-skinned woman kneeling over her tall, pale husband, crying as though she would never, ever be able to stop.

He watches her steadily in the darkness.

“You… for me, too” she says, haltingly. She watches his front teeth sink slightly into his lower lip. The skin at the corners of his eyes crinkles. For one, heart-stopping moment, she isn’t sure whether he is going to smile or cry.

Then he says “okay” in a weak, slightly hoarse voice, and she realises he isn’t sure, either.

She rolls towards him, reaching her free hand up to the side of his face. He lifts the hand from his chest to cover hers, turning his head slightly to place a kiss to her wrist, over her pulse.

She’s startled by how soft his mouth is. He closes his eyes, like it’s something reverent, and her throat closes up.

 

~ 

 

They grow increasingly tactile with one another, in the days and weeks following. It started with the destruction of Ego, but since the disastrous contract and the night time vigil, it picks up pace.

She ghosts her fingers over his hand on railings, when handing him tools, or beverages. He rests his hand on her shoulder when he passes her, or on her waist or hip when they all group around to look at the screens, the view, or Rocket’s latest invention.

The call comes in the middle of a sleep cycle. It’s Rocket, of all beings, who picks it up. He bangs on doors, sets off the fire alarm, until they’re all blearily in the cockpit and he’s pointing the hail screen at them.

“There’s been an eruption” says Dey, and he looks tired and haggard and unshaven.

“What, like, a volcano?” asks Peter.

“Yeah, and _how_. All the usual precautions in place, all the pressure-valves working. Just some anomaly below the surface. Blew the top right off the mountain. Local teams are on it and we’re on our way, but you guys are closer. We could sure do with a hand.”

“Of course” says Gamora, and the others nod in agreement.

 

They land as close as is safe and possible, but the ash cloud means they’re flying on instruments almost as soon as they drop into the planet’s atmosphere. Rocket curses as they’re buffeted by rocks and pumice in the cloud.

“Do you have these on Terra?” Drax calls, above the noise.

“Yeah, but I ain’t ever seen one. They wipe out whole cities when they go off, though.”

They take everything – every suit, gadget and gizmo they can carry. They dress themselves in heat-proof jumpsuits, with large, bulb-like helmets for maximum visibility. Rocket and Groot stay with the ship, and start running long-range scans to support the rescue effort.

The rest of them stagger out into the ash.

 

It’s a foot deep, at least, deeper in places. The air is thick with it. They stumble almost drunkenly to the command post, to see where they can help. Most of the city is clear, but the western side is especially choked with ash. A set of low level hovers ferry them across, skirting the edge of the town. As they rise to the height of the buildings, they can see the huge slew of molten rock, cutting a swathe through the city. It is brown, and blackened, already caked in the pervasive white ash, but bright, hair-line fissures of red and yellow spark across its surface as it rolls, inexorably, downhill.

“Holy shit” says Peter, under his breath, staring out at it.

“We are not over-mighty against the will of Nature” Drax says, solemnly.

 

They split up in groups – Peter and Kraglin, and Drax, Gamora and Mantis. The Xandarian authorities give them masks to hand out, and as they start clearing buildings and helping people, coughing and gasping to the hovers, they pass them out. They’re out maybe an hour – less, even – but it feels like days in the suits, and the dragging, clinging ash that hampers their movements.

And suddenly someone shouts “Run!”

It’s instinct, Peter decides later. Pure, primate instinct. Inborn, ineradicable.

He looks up at the mountain.

It’s still spewing thick, choking smog. And now a boiling, hundreds-of-miles-an-hour flow of molten rock, hurtling down the hillside at them.

They run for the hovers. He counts four other suited figures in his peripheral vision, plus various Xandarians. All accounted for.

They bundle onto the hovers, hauling rescued citizens up with them, being hauled up themselves. The engines buzz and strain as they veer away, the heat overwhelming even inside the suits – even the wind is hot. The sound of spontaneous combustion hisses and roars behind them as they pull away, and leaning back, Peter sees the trees falling in waves before the flow, and the furthest buildings simply vanish under the burning, fiery tide.

“Quill, report. Are you safe?”

Drax’s voice over the comm link startles him back to life inside the hover: the white-knuckled driver, the weeping, ash-encrusted Xandarians.

“Hey, yeah, I’m on a hover. Who’s with you?”

“I have Mantis. Is Kraglin with you?”

“Yeah right here” Peter turns, sees Kraglin waving at him over the victims huddled on the central benches. Despite the heat, something icy settles in his stomach.

“Did you say you have Gamora, and Mantis?”

A long pause, too long. Across the way he can see Kraglin’s face settling into a mask of worry.

“No. She is not here.”

The silence is awful. Panic grips him.

It’s only Kraglin’s super-Xandarian lunge across the hover which restrains Peter from leaping out into the ashy landscape below.

Which would have been “a real waste of even your sorry ass”, as Rocket later puts it.

All is chaos, and clamour: he tries to fight free of Kraglin, but the Ravager holds on and just about wrestles him to the floor of the hover. Some of the Xandarians run to help Kraglin, pinning Peter down, and as much as he shouts and yells, he cannot seem to make them understand. Drax’s voice in his ear counsels calm too, and that’s intolerable, unthinkable.

And then they finally pull free of the fog for a moment, to see a figure in a suit in the third hover ahead of them, waving frantically and gesturing to the side of its head.

 

 

“Killing yourself over a broken microphone, for d’ast sake, what kind of a moron are you?” back on the _Quadrant_ , Rocket takes back the helmet and shoves a set of clean scrubs at him, hard, as they file back onto the ship.

 

Peter does feel like a prize idiot. But he also feels filleted, boneless. His hands shake as he shampoos his hair for the third and fourth time.

He expects her to laugh at him. Raise a perfectly shaped eyebrow and silently judge him from eight feet away. Instead she does none of these things, and when he finally slinks off through the docking bay to the _Milano_ , she’s there, waiting for him.

He’s not sure what to do about it, until she reaches out her arms, guides his head into the crook of her neck and lets him fold himself around her. He breathes her in, slow, shuddering breaths, and she strokes his hair until he’s calmed down. He flexes his hands where they rest against her waist and back, feels how slight and strong she is. And solid, and real, and safe.

“I thought I’d lost you” he says, pathetically.

“I know.” She’d been able to hear everything through the earpiece – just frustratingly unable to join in the conversation.

He heaves another massive breath against her. She kneads the tense muscles in his shoulders, strokes the back of his neck.

“I would have been the same, if it had been you” she offers. It’s true, she was: right up until Rocket saw fit to hit her with the stun gun.

He nuzzles against her neck: she feels the warm smoothness of his lips, the rougher scrape of stubble. The prolonged, soft press of a kiss against her skin.

“Stay” he says, very quietly.

She freezes.

“Here?”

“Yeah.”

She swallows. Nerves flutter in her stomach. It’s ridiculous, because it’s Peter, after all, and they’ve already mutually decided that this is what forever looks like, for both of them. They’re doing things in the wrong order. But she trusts him, and he adores her.

“I don’t wanna wake up from… and you not be there” he admits. Sheepish.

She closes her eyes, folds her lips together, presses her forehead into his shoulder. _Nightmares_. He’s frightened of having _nightmares_. She relaxes a little – she hadn’t realised she’d been tense – but he obviously picks up on it.

“I didn’t – we don’t have to. _Shit_ , I meant, no sorry, I just… I meant – ”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

 

He’s gravitated back to the _Milano_ anyway, so no one will think anything of his empty cabin on the _Quadrant_.

Hers, though. That might excite some comment. She tries not to think about it.

He gives her a t-shirt to sleep in which falls almost to her knees. She changes in the bathroom, gives him a small smile on her way out, and then crawls under the covers and waits for him.

It strikes her that the room is very dark and the bed very small. She’s sure it was bigger when they were here before, listening to the rain and holding hands, with all their clothes on.

He’s back in a few minutes, dropping his worn clothes on a chair before crawling in beside her. She’s decided to embrace the unfamiliar as much as she can, and so she reaches out for him, folding and tucking their limbs together in the too small space. The first thing she notices is how warm he is. The second, how much taller and broader and just generally bigger he is. She’s ten times stronger, of course, but she feels suddenly claustrophobic. She wills her heart beat down.

They lie there in the darkness, and it feels odd and intimate and ever so slightly uncomfortable.

“Hey, turn over” he whispers, a light kiss against her hair line. She does, turning her back to him. He shifts one arm under the pillow, the other round her waist, tucks his knees up behind hers and curls his shoulders round her. She shuffles back against him and suddenly they fit together just right, and there’s enough space, and she feels secure, held and completely comfortable.

He kisses the back of her head.

“Better?”

She twines her fingers with his hand on her stomach.

“Better.”

 

~

 

He doesn’t have any nightmares that night.

Or the night after.

Or the night after that.

But she keeps staying, just in case.

**Author's Note:**

> So this has been living on my hard drive for a while. Go forth and be free, odd little ficlet!


End file.
